The role of testosterone in social interaction

Although animal researchers established the role of testosterone as a 'social hormone' decades ago, the investigation of its causal influence on human social behaviors has only recently begun. Here, we review and discuss recent studies showing the causal effects of testosterone on social interactions in animals and humans, and outline the basic neurobiological mechanisms that might underlie these effects. Based on these recent findings, we argue that the role of testosterone in human social behavior might be best understood in terms of the search for, and maintenance of, social status.     

The effect of induced anxiety on cognition: threat of shock enhances aversive processing in healthy individuals

Individuals with anxiety disorders demonstrate altered cognitive performance including (1) cognitive biases towards negative stimuli (affective biases) and (2) increased cognitive rigidity (e.g., impaired conflict adaptation) on affective Stroop tasks. Threat of electric shock is frequently used to induce anxiety in healthy individuals, but the extent to which this manipulation mimics the cognitive impairment seen in anxiety disorders is unclear. In this study, 31 healthy individuals completed an affective Stroop task under safe and threat-of-shock conditions. We showed that threat (1) enhanced aversive processing and abolished a positive affective bias but (2) had no effect on conflict adaptation. Threat of shock thus partially models the effects of anxiety disorders on affective Stroop tasks. We suggest that the affective state of anxiety—which is common to both threat and anxiety disorders—modulates the neural inhibition of subcortical aversive processing, whilst pathologies unique to anxiety disorders modulate conflict adaptation.     

How Work-Family Research Can Finally Have an Impact in Organizations

Although work-family research has mushroomed over the past several decades, an implementation gap persists in putting work-family research into practice. Because of this, work-family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted. The goal of this article is to clarify areas where implementation gaps between work-family research and practice are prevalent, discuss the importance of reducing these gaps, and make the case that both better and different research should be conducted. We recommend several alternative but complementary actions for the work-family researcher: (a) work with organizations to study their policy and practice implementation efforts, (b) focus on the impact of rapid technological advances that are blurring work-family boundaries, (c) conduct research to empower the individual to self-manage the work-family interface, and (d) engage in advocacy and collaborative policy research to change institutional contexts and break down silos. Increased partnerships between industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology practitioners and researchers from many industries and disciplines could break down silos that we see as limiting development of the field.     

A preliminary study of medial temporal lobe function in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect

Previous research findings have linked caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect with sensitivity to threatening cues. The present preliminary study investigated whether dysfunctions of the medial temporal lobe could underlie these associations. Using fMRI, we measured medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces (angry, fearful, happy, neutral) among 30 youths. Eleven of the youths had a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect. Attention states (i.e., attention to anger, fear, or physical attributes, or passive viewing) were systematically manipulated. Relative to comparison youths, youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect showed significantly greater left amygdala and left anterior hippocampus activation during the processing of threatening information. To our knowledge, these findings are the first to demonstrate altered medial temporal lobe function during the processing of threat cues in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect.     

Angry facial expressions hamper subsequent target identification

There is considerable evidence indicating that people are primed to monitor social signals of disapproval. Thus far, studies on selective attention have concentrated predominantly on the spatial domain, whereas the temporal consequences of identifying socially threatening information have received only scant attention. Therefore, this study focused on temporal attention costs and examined how the presentation of emotional expressions affects subsequent identification of task-relevant information. High (n = 30) and low (n = 31) socially anxious women were exposed to a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Emotional faces (neutral, happy, angry) were presented as the first target (T1) and neutral letter stimuli (p, q, d, b) as the second target (T2). Irrespective of social anxiety, the attentional blink was relatively large when angry faces were presented as T1. This apparent prioritized processing of angry faces is consistent with evolutionary models, stressing the importance of being especially attentive to potential signals of social threat.     

Social neuroeconomics: the neural circuitry of social preferences

Combining the methods of neuroscience and economics generates powerful tools for studying the brain processes behind human social interaction. We argue that hedonic interpretations of theories of social preferences provide a useful framework that generates interesting predictions and helps interpret brain activations involved in altruistic, fair and trusting behaviors. These behaviors are consistently associated with activation in reward-related brain areas, such as the striatum, and with prefrontal activity implicated in cognitive control, the processing of emotions, and integration of benefits and costs, consistent with resolution of a conflict between self-interest and other-regarding motives.     

Antecedents of Children's Adult Outcomes in the Texas Adoption Project

ABSTRACT Four composite variables concerning life outcomes were derived from a brief mail questionnaire describing 478 adults, now in their 30s and 40s, who had participated as children in the Texas Adoption Project. Responses were obtained from the participants themselves, their parents, and their siblings. MMPI scores of the parental generation were correlated with the adult outcomes of their biologically related and unrelated children. The obtained correlations were low, but for the biological relationships positive parent adjustment went with positive life outcomes of their children, whereas for adoptive relationships the reverse was the case. Favorable MMPI scores from late adolescence were favorably related to adult outcomes, as were favorable personality ratings from childhood.     

Predicate Logical Extensions of some Subintuitionistic Logics

The paper presents predicate logical extensions of some subintuitionistic logics. Subintuitionistic logics result if conditions of the accessibility relation in Kripke models for intuitionistic logic are dropped. The accessibility relation which interprets implication in models for the propositional base subintuitionistic logic considered here is neither persistent on atoms, nor reflexive, nor transitive. Strongly complete predicate logical extensions are modeled with a second accessibility relation, which is a partial order, for the interpretation of the universal quantifier. Presented by Melvin Fitting     

What's in a name? Attachment-related attentional bias

Participants completed a dot probe task that presented pairs of first names: the participant's own name and a neutral name (Experiments 1-4), the name of their attachment figure and a neutral name (Experiments 1-4), or the name of a known person and a neutral name (Experiments 2-4). A significant attentional bias effect was found for the attachment name in attachment-related contexts, whether they were threatening or positive. The results of Experiments 2 and 4 showed that the attentional bias effects for the attachment name were not driven by familiarity effects and could not be interpreted in terms of salience. Attachment anxiety was associated with hypervigilance toward the attachment name in threatening and positive attachment contexts. Attachment avoidance was unrelated to any attentional bias effects.     

Attention for emotional faces under restricted awareness revisited: do emotional faces automatically attract attention?

Theoretical models of attention for affective information have assigned a special status to the cognitive processing of emotional facial expressions. One specific claim in this regard is that emotional faces automatically attract visual attention. In three experiments, the authors investigated attentional cueing by angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions that were presented under conditions of limited awareness. In these experiments, facial expressions were presented in a masked (14 ms or 34 ms, masked by a neutral face) and unmasked fashion (34 ms or 100 ms). Compared with trials containing neutral cues, delayed responding was found on trials with emotional cues in the unmasked, 100-ms condition, suggesting stronger allocation of cognitive resources to emotional faces. However, in both masked and unmasked conditions, the hypothesized cueing of visual attention to the location of emotional facial expression was not found. In contrary, attentional cueing by emotional faces was less strong compared with neutral faces in the unmasked, 100-ms condition. These data suggest that briefly presented emotional faces influence cognitive processing but do not automatically capture visual attention.